Three Revolutionary Films by Ousmane Sembene - Emitaï / Xala / Ceddo (Criterion Collection, 3 Blu-rays)

Read more

Having blazed a trail for African filmmakers to tell their own stories on-screen, Senegalese auteur Ousmane Sembène took his career-long project—to unlock cinema’s potential as a vehicle for social change—in increasingly urgent and provocative directions in the 1970s. Searing critiques of colonialism, political corruption, patriarchal arrogance, and religious indoctrination, his three features from this decade—the radical call to resistance Emitaï, the wickedly subversive satire Xala, and the controversial historical epic Ceddo—confirmed his standing as a fearless truth-teller for whom the camera was the ultimate weapon in the fight against oppression in all its forms.

New 4K digital restorations of all three films, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks
New conversation between Mahen Bonetti, founder and executive director of the African Film Festival, and writer Amy Sall
The Making of “Ceddo,” a 1981 documentary by Paulin Soumanou Vieyra
New English subtitle translations
PLUS: An essay by film scholar Yasmina Price